Friday, March 30, 2012

Kaiser Proposes Benefit Cuts to Partnership Unions

Today, the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions finished its second round of bargaining
with Kaiser Permanente, which took place in Los Angeles from March 27-29. What
happened?

According to an email that SEIU-UHW sent to its members, Kaiser proposed the same cuts to workers’ health benefits that they
earlier proposed to NUHW, the Stationary Engineers, the Pharmacists and other
non-partnership unions.

But wait a sec! What about Dave Regan’s genius
strategy of “getting out in front of Kaiser’s cuts” by proposing SEIU’s own
set of preemptive benefit reductions (a.k.a, SEIU’s enhanced wellness program)? Well, here’s
an excerpt from SEIU-UHW’s email (full email is below):

We just
finished our second session of national bargaining for a new contract with
Kaiser…

In bargaining,
we presented our idea to improve Kaiser: we take collective responsibility for
improving our health, which is both good for us and keeps healthcare costs in
check. In return, we called on Kaiser to deliver on our bargaining priorities…

So what was
Kaiser’s response? Flex healthcare plans — just like the takeaway packages that
they have been making to Kaiser managers, pharmacists, and other workers—which
force workers to pay more for healthcare.

And how bad are Kaiser’s proposed cuts? Basically, part-time
workers would be forced to pay about $700 a month to get health insurance for
their families. (Currently, these workers pay $0, which is the longtime
standard in California’s healthcare industry.) For more details on the proposed cuts, check out this post with leaflets recently
circulated by AFSCME’s United Nurses Association of California.

Of course, these are precisely the cuts that NUHW, the CNA
and the Stationary Engineers have been fighting by conducting massive strikes, which SEIU has tried to undermine.

So what’s going on? According to insiders, SEIU’s Dave Regan has already made a secret
deal with Kaiser’s executives to accept the company’s benefit cuts. That’s why SEIU tried to undermine NUHW’s earlier strikes. And
that’s why SEIU has failed to prepare any sort of campaign to fight Kaiser.

So what’ll happen next? Tasty predicts that SEIU officials
will stage a fake campaign of “sticker days” and rallies at Kaiser hospitals that
will stretch into late April. At the end of this half-hearted campaign, Dave Regan
and John August will turn to Kaiser
workers, shrug their shoulders and say, “See? We tried. But we just couldn’t
change Kaiser’s mind.” And SEIU, in its predictably dishonest way, will tell workers that the cuts are actually “improvements,” like
they did at Catholic Healthcare West.

It’s clear that Kaiser sees its current negotiations with the Coalition as a
once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to roll back workers’ benefits to levels not
seen in decades. Kaiser’s executives are abundantly aware that their counterparts on the other side of the bargaining table -- Dave Regan and John August -- are weak, incompetent
and corrupt. That’s why Kaiser plans to extract billions of
dollars of concessions from its workforce even though Kaiser pocketed $6.1
billion in profits during the past three years.

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